ABSTRACT
James Shirley’s A Pastorall Called the Arcadia (pb. 1640) has never garnered much scholarly attention, and the little it has received has been largely negative. In fact, Alfred Harbage tried to have it disowned as Shirley’s altogether, claiming that ‘Shirley had nothing to do with it except as the victim of a bookseller’s ruse’.1 His evidence is, by his own admission, circumstantial, mostly resting on his conviction that the play lacks the sophisticated wit of Shirley’s other work. However, this play deserves closer examination, especially since it participates in a greater Arcadian cultural phenomenon during the reign of Charles I. Scholars like Blair Worden have associated Sir Philip Sidney and, by extension, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia with the militant ‘hotter’ Protestants of the Elizabethan court; in contrast, Caroline adaptations of the Arcadia co-opt its stories for a dramatically different purpose: to argue for an irenic foreign and domestic policy, especially toward France and Scotland.
